TGFN

That's a mash-up of TGIF (yay!) and TTFN (till soon!), but it also stands for "Thank Goodness for Network" and "Thank God for Nathaniel." I love to link up when I read a piece of film writing that really excites me, and Nathaniel's brilliant, witty, and gorgeously modulated take on Network is a total grabber. It deserves a hot rating in the triple digits and a 100 share.

If When I resume that long-interrupted favorites countdown, as I keep promising, I'm going to have to own up to the passage of time by reshuffling the order a bit, and dropping in some more recent fetish objects ... which also means phasing out a few of the originals. Network will be one of the titles that will have to fight for its life on that list—my most recent visit, to prep for my own write-up, dropped the film a peg or two in my esteem. But, if Network winds up in what Faye Dunaway's Diana Christensen so memorably calls "the sh*thouse," I'll leave you to wonder whether I really didn't like it enough to keep it in, or whether I just want to retire my essay because I like Nathaniel's so much better. (The only point where we disagree? So long as Long Day's Journey into Night and Dog Day Afternoon are around, Network won't ever be Lumet's best movie.)

Photo © 1976 MGM/United Artists